The WSJ reports that Goss's appointee as executive director of the CIA, Kyle Foggo, is under criminal investigation relating to possible bribery from defense contractor Brent Wilkes. I figure this is probably enough to explain Goss's resignation, even if there aren't pictures of him with a goat dressed up as a cheerleader. (via Talking Points Memo.)

The Modesto Kid pointed me to this article on a peace accord signed yesterday between the Sudanese government and the SLA, the largest rebel group. It calls for the disarmament of the Janjaweed militias, and guaranteed majority representation for the rebel groups in the Darfurian legislatures. While the JEM, a muslim rebel group that had been allied with the SLA and other primarily Christian and animist groups [facts corrected courtesy of dsquared], is still holding out, this is at the very least a good sign (with the caveat noted below that I haven't a clue, in any broad sense, of what is really going on here.)

Long time lurker, first time commenter, and no, I was not at the NYC
blogomeet, not even in disguise.

Okay. I'm smart, am fit, have wit (some), don't break mirrors, et
cetera. If I'm not halfway down life's road, I can see it at the next
light, by the gas station. Everyone I know who is interested in
settling down already has... except me. I have been goddam single for
my adult life, except for six months of living together with Entirely
The Wrong Person. A whole lot of weird hook-ups and non-dates and
friends-without-benefits and benefits-without-friends and
what-will-my-friends-think and
whatever-happened-last-night-we-will-never-speak-of-again and that
sort of thing. And a whole lot of nothing too. No relationships, no
romance. Just these awkward manuevers and whatevers.

And this was OK, sort of, in college and in grad school. In my later
twenties, it was less OK. Thirty... when I was twenty, I thought I'd
be married by thirty. Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three... after
passing the Jesus mark, even other people began to find my single
condition alarming. My mom stopped telling me to go to church to find
a nice woman, and started suggesting I tell women I was divorced.

The pool of friends of friends has long since dried up. My Internet
dates resemble the lost Kafka episodes of Three's Company. The set-up
dates have been even worse. I already go to the gym, do yoga, attend
readings, hit the museums, et cetera. I _like_ these things.

I don't smoke, don't do drugs, drink in moderation. I'm godfather to
two remarkable children, and have been named emergency guardian of two
more. I've been best man and bride's man. I've been to a lot of
weddings. The only really odd thing about me in this personal ad style
classification scheme is that I am very much not a pet person. Never
had any, don't understand them, don't understand the appeal.

Anyway. Frankly, I'm at my wit's end. Can you help, o mysterious Tia?

Halfway Done in Brooklyn

Dear Halfway Done,

Are you in therapy? Because my advice is that you should be. If, despite not really having a problem being attractive to women or finding sex, you have only been in one six month relationship, my intuition is that you are closed off to the possibility and sabotaging it somehow. Some of your descriptions of your relationships seem to indicate that, in fact: "what-will-my-friends-think"? By the time you're as relationship-hungry as you say you are, that shouldn't be high on your list of concerns. So you need to figure out if it's the case that you're sabotaging potential relationships, and if so, why you're doing it and how you can stop. That's best done in therapy.

I have been remiss in the giving of advice! But in celebration of the end of my school semester, here is a two-for-one Ask the Mineshaft.

Dear Tia,

I finally did my training for the Kaganville Urban Ministries Find-A-Friend program two weeks ago (similar to Big Brother). As a part of the background check, I had to submit four non-family references. Looking for a quasi-professional reference, I submitted a former professor and academic adviser under whom I worked as a research assistant for over a year. We can call him Dr. "Wiggles." Dr. Wiggles and I always got along fine in class, and though he was a tough grader, he at least gave the appearance of being pleased with my work. Today I received a call from the head of the local chapter of Urban Ministries. He politely requested that I submit another reference because Dr. Wiggles had spoken very poorly of me -- "basically chewed you out" were his words, which I took figuratively, since it was just a questionnaire. At first I was of course quite surprised to learn that at some point during our 2-year relationship I apparently gave Dr. Wiggles the distinct impression that I am not fit to take "at risk" children to a basketball game, or out for ice cream perhaps -- that I would not be positive influence for children whose parents are incarcerated, in rehab, or worse, not in rehab. After turning it over for a while, I remembered that Dr. Wiggles was, as I recall, a bit put off that I dropped out of school after my sophomore year. My question is, do I confront him? If so, with a knife or blunt object? -- I can't decide.

Signed,
Cranky in Kaganville

And the followup:

Hi, Tia,
Although potentially I would still like to hear your answer, I spoke with someone else from the Urban Ministries office this afternoon who cleared up part of my utter bewilderment at Wiggles reply. Some of my professor's "bad" marks may actually have been indicating that he could not speak to my ability to work with kids because he had never seen me act in that capacity, and not general disapproval of the idea of my working with kids.

Thanks,
Cranky

Dear Cranky,

My advice is to contact potential references before you put them down to ask if they’d be comfortable being references.

Yours in hating references because it feels like people are having secret conversations about me,
Tia

Okay, next question.

Dear Tia,

I have a question of relationship etiquette.
Say you meet someone, and you go on a few dates, and you maybe have
sex a few times, and things are seeming like they're off to a great
start.

Say you live in the Bay Area, but it's pretty guaranteed you're going
to be leaving for parts unknown in about X months, and parts unknown
could totally be the East Coast.

Now, if X is like 1/2, you're pretty much an asshole if you don't tell
the person who just made you breakfast about your plans, *right now*. But if X is 24, it's not really worth spoiling the moment, and who
knows what can happen in 24 months- the other person's not locked into
the area, but would not dig a long-distance relationship.

Where's the asshole-vs.-don't-bother cutoff, in months?

Sincerely,
Overthinking in Oakland

Dear Overthinking,

In no case is there a reason to conceal something from the other person, nor is there a reason to make an Announcement with great portent. Your plans for the future would presumably come up in one of those staple first-few-dates conversations: “What are your plans for the future?” Then you should mention them, no matter the value of X. It either won’t make a difference to the person in question, because they’re not taking the relationship so seriously they’re planning X months ahead, or it will matter, and they’ll make their decision.

Radio tomorrow morning, 9 to noon PST. I'm subbing for the woman whose show, The Jewish Alternative, features, well, Jewish music, so you can expect a higher-than-normal quota of klezmer, along with George Lewis (f'real this time), Jandek, 5uu's, and Jaga Jazzist. The playlist will be accessible here when the time comes.

Dsquared has a piece up in the Guardian blog on ongoing peace talks between the Sudanese government and the rebels who have been the subject of genocidal attacks by the government's Janjaweed proxies. He thinks the talks have some decent chance of producing a good outcome.

I'm posting this mostly because I don't really know a damn thing about what's going on in the Sudan -- I've had Darfur mentally filed for awhile under "Ongoing news stories that make me so catastrophically depressed that I avoid thinking about them, instead using them as conversational shorthand for 'really awful stuff'." I'd had no idea that anything that might be perceived as positive was going on there. So, to the extent you've been in the same boat, click through and start paying attention to what an improvement in the situation might possibly look like, and how it might come about. (Via Crooked Timber.)

Given my handle, you might think that I'd have even the most arcane rules for apostrophe usage down pat. But even I am flummoxed at how to indicate possession for a person whose name already ends in an apostrophe. Therefore, I will go the alternate route and refer to the helpful marriage tips for women as provided by Marie Jon'. Or, more specifically, Sadly, No!'s the excellent deconstruction thereof as provided by Sadly, No! Tip number one? Don't be a feminist. Also, don't expect your husband to be "a girlfriend."

My favorite moment of Marie Jon''s the essay by Marie Jon' is the following sentence, which is quite possibly the first in the history of the English language to be written simultaneously in the first, second, and third persons: "Treat each other with the dignity they deserve, for we are made in the image of God."

The Ohio primary on Tuesday was riddled with problems: lost memory cards, failed memory cards, optical scan machines that couldn't scan the ballots printed, and workers that couldn't figure out how to turn the machines on. This is just ridiculous -- the only important thing about running an election is that the results be transparent and reliable (and, a distant third, that results be available reasonably quickly). Why is anyone still using Diebold when they keep on screwing up like this? And can we go back just making 'X's in little boxes with a pen, if the high tech methods are too hard? (Via TalkLeft.)

There are very few times when I regret my inability to watch any flash content I want (since the latest version hasn't been released for Linux yet). However, the flash ad (which might be NSFW, I dunno) corresponding to this print ad has got me bewailing my fate.

Not new, but now seems like a good time to remind people of one of the more prominent previous times (explicit text, max roach) a major consumer electronics corporation concerned itself with the sexual well-being of ordinary folks.

I was raised Southern Baptist so I am not familiar with all the ins and outs of this process, but is there a form somewhere we can fill out to get St. Homobonus declared the patron saint of Unfogged? Because that sure seems like a natural fit.

Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we'd be called imperialist oppressors, then.

UPDATE: Various people (with various degrees of enthusiasm) see the above as a call for invasion. It was, rather, a comment on the vacuity of the "imperialist oppressors" language. Though I was probably wrong there anyway: If we really were imperialist oppressors, the critics would be sucking up.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ah, I see that Scott Adams has engaged in a similar thought experiment. His closing line rings true.

But just to troll a bit more, I do think that seizing Saudi and Iranian oil would be entirely morally justifiable on terms usually approved of by the left: They didn't earn it, they inherited it (it's like the Estate Tax writ large!). They're extracting huge profits for fatcats at the expense of the poor. They're racist, sexist, homophobic theocrats! (Literally!) Surely if it's ever permissible to redistibute wealth by force, this is the case. Right?

Right. Lawyers, Guns, and Money has the right response, as well as a number of other really satisfying posts. Honestly, of all the things that would suck about getting denied tenure, one of the worst will be thinking that Glenn Reynolds has reached a level of intellectual accomplishment that eluded my grasp.

I doubt many marriage counselors carry malpractice insurance, but if they did, would it cover this?

A McHenry County man is suing his marriage counselor, contending the therapist he hired to help improve his marriage instead began an affair with his wife. That relationship eventually prompted the couple to divorce, according to the breach-of-contract suit filed by 35-year-old Scott Buetow of Lake in the Hills.

There was a magnitude 8.1 earthquake off the coast of Tonga an hour or two ago. Everyone cross your fingers for all my old students in Samoa, would you? Pretty much everything in the country is within a couple of hundred yards of the water.

If the guy who presided over the decision isn't prepared to defend his conduct under oath, for fear that he'll get tossed in jail for what he did, can we go ahead and get Plan B approved for OTC sale now?

A good column on the march from Juan Gonzalez, a neighbor of mine. This all seems pretty simple to me. We're a nation of immigrants -- you aren't an American because of some inherited quality of Americanness, you're an American because you, or your family, chose to come here [or for those whose families were brought here against their will, chose to stay here]. And we can talk all we like about respect for the law, and the importance of keeping control of the borders, but the recent immigrants who marched yesterday are here working and keeping the country running. We need them, or others like them, here.

And so long as we need them here, it is just wrong and anti-American to treat them as criminals, or deprive them of the protection of the laws. I'm not sure how to handle this practically, but I know that the system we have now, where hardworking people holding down jobs for decades in the US fear deportation, is simply wrong.

This post at TPM Cafe is fantastic -- he pins down what is wrong with the hawks' attitude toward war, and how that needs to control our discussion of Iran. We're dealing with people who think that war is a good thing; and are afraid they're going to lose an opportunity for one if the situation with Iran settles down. We can't block them, unless we address that head on.

I had the same thought reading a Thomas Friedman editorial back in 2002 -- he referred to the upcoming war in Iraq as a "war of choice," not essential, but we should do it anyway. And I sat back and thought "You incredible moron. War involves, necessarily, setting innocent people on fire. And eviscerating them. If you have a 'choice' as to whether you start a war, the only choice that isn't completely morally bankrupt is 'no'. War is only for situations where you have no other option." We're dealing with people who don't remember that.

But go read Yglesias; he lays it out with commendable force and clarity.

Everyone and her dog has blogged on this Boston Globe article, about Bush's use of signing statements. If you haven't read it yet, the Globe notes that Bush has, in signing statements, declared an intention not to consider himself bound by at least some terms of 750 laws passed by Congress (none of which he has actually vetoed -- after all, vetoes can be overridden). Some topics on which Bush has declared that he is legally permitted to disobey the law as passed by Congress are any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military (did you know that Congress has passed four laws during Bush's term prohibiting the US military from engaging in combat in Colombia? And that Bush doesn't consider himself bound by those laws?); laws requiring him to inform Congress before diverting funds from a public program to start a new secret program, which Congress has no knowledge of; and laws generally requiring executive branch officials to inform Congress in a host of areas.

Now, signing statements of this sort aren't new -- Clinton had some of them -- but they've generally been reserved to narrow points of constitutional law. For example, a number of Clinton's signing statements concerned attempts by Congress to delegate its power to direct executive branch actions to a Congressional committee; the Supreme Court has held that that power can't be so delegated. Bush, on the other hand, is in his signing statements claiming unchecked power over any military action; unchecked power to divert funding from programs approved by Congress to programs Congress has never been informed of; and unchecked power to withhold information about what it is that he's actually doing with all of these powers.

Our Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws, to decide whether our country should go to war, and to decide how and on what our country will spend its revenues. Bush is claiming the power to override Congress in all of those regards. The powers he's claiming are those of a dictator -- we don't know to what degree he's actually exercising them, but we know what he thinks he can do.

You may all have seen this already, but Crooks and Liars only had the partial video, and that link is to Democratic Underground which has the complete version. I know it's everywhere in the blogosphere, but it's truly the stuff of which awesome is made, and it needs to be recorded at Unfogged. I now know why Colbert has special pants made with the crotch seam eight inches lower than normal.

Or rather, absence of rapport! with the President! and everyone else who contributed to the generally cold reception of his routine. Stephen Colbert was the entertainment at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a bunch of links relating thereto:

The greatest thing about the new "take back the night" chickenhawk reclamation is not just the ghey logo. (Wait, what did we decide on? Fey, or something? Prissy?). No, it's the comments. I seriously can't believe they're doing this. Really can't believe it, at all. Still, everything actual is possible, as they say...:

Captain,
It seems to me that when one's country calls, one should respond with the very best one has - with what you are best at. Having served in the military a very long time ago, and being an unwilling victim of advancing age and persistent gravity, I find that my best resource is my ability to express my conviction as eloquently and persuasively as I can. Not to convert those on the opposite end of the spectrum, but to buttress and strengthen those who share my world view and inform those whose opinions are yet unformed. On the surface, of course, this sounds laughably self-serving and a towering rationalization. Bear with me a moment, however, for I have a point to advance.

As I have stated on previous occasions, the great achilles heal of a free society at war in defence of its freedom, is its ability to maintain the support of its citizens. If the conflict be short, the enemy of obvious evil and the victory clear, then the support will be easily held. Victory has a thousand fathers, afterall. If however, the war is long and the enemy is elusive and victory is ill defined, then a free society is at a distinct disadvantage. A nation that cannot be smashed, can instead be nibbled to death!

And so, I and my keyboard stand at the pass - the weakest point. Armed only with words and whatever wisdom I may have gained along the way, to point to the danger and urge the defenders determination. To clarify the mist of confusion and uncertainty and to defend the vision of our purpose. These are my best weapons and I stand, old and bent and nearly used up, in the critical breach.

I would be honored to join your company, if you would have me, such as I am.
Posted by: Lew

O.M.G. I have read many, many lame things in the internet. Damn, I checked into a Charles Johnson "picture of the sky which attracts 680 kill the koranimals comments" thread just the other day. But. Holy. Shit. That is like the kryptonite of lame. "I and my keyboard stand at the pass"?! If that's not actually the Medium Lobster then...well then someone is supernaturally gay prissy.

Or howzabout this?:

Sir: Request permission to come aboard. I will post the logo immediately.

Respectfully,
The Discerning Texan
Posted by: Charles Waldie

There are lots and lots of "permission to come aboard" posts. I have seen more manly martial virtue assembled in a MMP Doom team of 12-year-olds, frankly. I feel a bit sad in relating this, but "Captain" Ed is so styled in virtue of his exceptional Star Trek fandom. No, really. I'm sure that if I were just a little more patient with google I would be able to find his slashfic about that mutated hot chick who's like some kind of star child who inexplicably wants to fuck this little weird troll during her time on this material plane. Still, does anyone think they are going to wear their new chickenhawk logo tees down at the next VFW parade? I'm willing to lay odds on the WWI veteran in the wheelchair, who's using an oxygen tank. Like, 20 to one.